Sight & Sound

Recent highlights

As Kirk Douglas reaches his 100th birthday, we celebrate the dimpled one with a survey of his extraordinary career, plus a video tribute to his host of classic roles playing ruthless villains, morally ambiguous mavericks and self-interested sharks.
Friday 2 September 2016

In the iconic singer’s visual album, marital infidelity prompts a retreat to a poeticised world of women in the American South, where she rewrites traumas of black history, finds Kelli Weston.
Thursday 8 December 2016

Competitions

Two packages of Criterion Collection Blu-rays to be won including The Royal Tenenbaums, Punch Drunk Love and three other randomly selected titles from the Criterion back catalogue – plus some special Criterion merchandise for one lucky winner.

More recent stories from Sight & Sound

The Harry Potter author extends her Wizarding World to Prohibition-era New York with this ambitious if sometimes awkward offcut, the first of five planned movies based on her 2001 whimsical bestiary, writes Kim Newman.

At one of the world’s most remote film festivals, cinema is still a fledgling medium, but it is already being put into use as a weapon of resistance. Can film really save the Sahrawis, asks Alex Dudok de Wit?

Kurdistan’s welcoming Duhok International Film Festival screened films that dealt directly, and for the most part fairly, with ongoing fights against Isis, oppression and xenophobia, reports Celluloid Liberation Front.

The production history of the extraordinary 1927 film – and of the painstaking, decades-long efforts to reconstruct the film from surviving prints – displays some of the fearless single-mindedness and megalomaniac ambition of the emperor himself. By Paul Cuff.

Women are unusually well-represented on screen in Korean cinema. Behind the camera is a different story – for reasons that say more about our own biases than we might care to recognise, reports Darcy Paquet.

Artist-filmmakers and archivists waltzed together as new films delved into local rituals and compelling found footage, while programmers unturned gems from cheery 3D curios to 60s psychedelia, reports Henry K. Miller.

From Bill Morrison’s history dig in the Yukon to Fiona Tan’s decolonial meditation on Mount Fuji, much of this year’s LFF Experimenta delved back into cinema’s past to forge funky and unfamiliar visions of the medium’s future, writes Sophie Mayer.

The annual horror movie marathon may no longer be an after-hours affair, but this year’s selection offered many films obsessed with bedtime and the fear of things that go bump in the night, says Anton Bitel.

A few years back, East Asian cinema experienced a boom in popularity, but these days, most titles find it difficult to get even a small release in the UK. Can audiences learn to embrace Eastern cinema once again, asks Anton Bitel?

Witches are not just for Halloween, or for horror movies. Charlotte Richardson Andrews celebrates the screen’s sexier, more sisterly sorceresses: symbols of divine feminine magic and healing rather than bloodthirsty she-devils. With video by Leigh Singer.

Video

What makes French film noir French? Dive down to the lowest depths with Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin’s video abstract, charting six key Gallic characteristics of cinema’s most alluringly brooding genre.

As Kirk Douglas reaches his 100th birthday, we celebrate the dimpled one with a survey of his extraordinary career, plus a video tribute to his host of classic roles playing ruthless villains, morally ambiguous mavericks and self-interested sharks.